1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a resource management system for use by personnel managing an incident. Additionally, the present invention relates to a computer system and method for emergency personnel to efficiently collect, store, aggregate and manage availability information regarding resources and equipment according to the needs of the patients, evacuees, people or those injured.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A multiple-victim disaster or an emergency can overwhelm ill-prepared local or state officials. This is especially true if resources available to handle the disaster or the emergency are constrained. In the case of a medical disaster, disaster victims may be routed to medical facilities where the medical resources (number of available beds, facilities to treat a certain type of victims) are limited or already in use for treating similar victims from the same disaster location or another disaster location. In such a case, there may be other medical facilities that are equipped to accommodate the victims, but may be unutilized for a number of reasons, primarily lack of knowledge about the availability of resources at a facility.
Hence, there is a need for a system that tracks in real-time the availability of resources across multiple facilities in order to better direct victims of an emergency or disaster to these resources. Additionally, the system should be able to categorize these resources and the patients/victims needs so that it can better direct the patients/victims according to the type of resource required to treat the patient/victim. The system should also be able to track the availability of resources from multiple facilities across regions, cities and in certain cases across states. This system should be accessible at the emergency location or at multiple locations in case of a natural disaster to enable central tracking of the resources. The system should also support communication of resource status and availability across one or many users in the region, city, county, state or other response territory. Furthermore, this system should utilize common standards such that different facilities can use existing systems to connect to such a system and report their resource availability. This system should be able to collect availability information from a number of facilities and aggregate the data so that people responsible for managing the emergencies are provided with aggregated counts by cities, regions or other aggregation criterion.
One such system is described in U.S. Publication No. 20040138925, titled “Resources utilization management system and method of use”. This patent application describes a resource utilization system that graphically depicts utilization levels of resources in a hospital. Examples of the different types of resources include beds, rooms as well as human resources such as medical staff, physicians, etc. The application further describes the method of managing these resources by first assigning these resources to subjects such as patients. During the assignment, the system displays the utilization of the resources giving an indication to the user about the availability of the resources.
U.S. Publication No. 20030074222, titled “System and method for Managing Patient Bed Assignments and Bed Occupancy in a Health Care Facility” describes a computer implemented system for managing the assignment of beds in a medical facility. The claimed system functions in conjunction with an admission/discharge/transfer system and keeps track of the beds in a medical facility and the assignment of beds to incoming patients. It also displays a real-time status of the beds available in the facility and the beds that are currently assigned to patients in the facility.
U.S. Publication No. 20040243446, titled “Method and a System for Optimizing Hospital Beds and Ambulance Allocations via a Computer Network” describes a computer based system that enables users to view the real-time status of beds available in a medical facility such as a hospital. Further, the system enables the hospital to communicate this status to an ambulance that is directing one or more patients to the hospital. If the hospital does not have the available capacity to accommodate the patients being transported in the ambulance, then the ambulance is redirected to a second facility or hospital.
From the above discussion, it is clear that there is a need for a system that will enable tracking availability of resources from multiple facilities. The system should also be able to list resources by type so that availability of a certain type of resource, such as, bed capacity by triage category is readily available. Additionally, the system should be able to gather resource availability information from different regional systems and medical facilities. It should be able to present this information at the time of emergency so that the information can be used to make better decisions.